[Plplot-general] plplot TEA/tcl patch

[Vince D. <vi...@sa...>]

Making progress on breaking out my changes.  The first step seems to be to
get something with Tcl/plplot to build properly using the TEA framework
for Tcl extensions.  On that front I've prepared the necessary
configure.in/makefile.in which allow the 'Matrix' piece of Plplot to be
compiled as a standalone Tcl extension (shared library which can be loaded
into Tcl, via 'load' or 'package require Matrix').

The necessary changes are tiny (but more will be required when I begin to
tackle the real pl-tcl and pl-tk parts of plplot).  However it would be
useful if someone could verify that this actually works on some unix
platform (it works fine on Windows under cygwin).

All that should be required is:

autoconf
./configure
make
make install

And then in a tcl or tk shell, try

package require Matrix

which should return '0.1' and make the 'matrix' command available.

The only complication to the above is that you might need to specify some
directories to './configure'.  This is documented in a readme in my
changes.

If you'd like to try, please grab 'pltcl.patch' and 'tcltk.tar.gz' from

ftp://ftp.ucsd.edu/pub/alpha/tcl/extensions/

(please ignore the other plplot related stuff in there!)

'pltcl.patch' is a cvs-extracted diff to be applied to the files in
bindings/tcl (very minor changes to plplot 5.1 from cvs)

'tcltk.tar.gz' is a NEW directory, to be placed alongside bindings/tcl and
bindings/tk.  The idea is that it will contain the TEA compliant
configure/makefile stuff to build Tcl/Tk extensions using the source code
in the rest of plplot.  There is a readme in that directory.

I stress: this works 'out of the box' in cygwin, and ought to (if the TEA
designers got it right) work similarly on unix.  You will need a
reasonably modern version of Tcl/Tk installed (e.g. 8.1-8.3).  The
resulting shared library should be loadable into _any_ Tcl release 8.1 or
newer.

cheers,

-- Vince

<http://www.santafe.edu/~vince>